Desolate Me

Overuse I Love You

Peter was starting on his homework and I was flipping through the channels when my father came in with what looked like an old keepsake box.

“What is that?”

He just smiled and sat down next to me. He took the clicker and turned off the TV so there would be no distractions.

“Instead of me telling you what I know,” he took the cover off, “I thought I’d let you mother.”

“Oh my god.”

The box was filled with letters, pictures, newspaper clippings…

The last thing on top was a printed out email from my mom. I read it over, it was dated a few days before she died. She talked about mundane things really. She wondered how I would take moving to America, if my father and I would get along.

“I can’t read these.” I looked at him. “Some of these…they have to be private.”

“Cass,” he took one of my hands, linking his fingers between mine, “I know you’ve been wondering what exactly it was she was thinking. Well, here’s your chance. This is what I knew of you before we met at the school. Besides the phone calls that you never answered, this is what I had.”

“But these are…” I looked back down at the box and its contents, “these are her thoughts, feelings…there’s probably stuff in here I don’t want to know. All I knew of you was that she didn’t like you very much.”

“I know but…” he reached in, shuffled around a little, and pulled out a picture, “I loved you. We loved you. Once upon a time we were a family, the three of us.”

I took the well worn picture from him and looked at it. I’d never seen it before. It was a young version of him obviously but he didn’t look much older than Peter did now. He was in a white undershirt, sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck. A cigarette was in his mouth barely clinging to his lips, sunglasses on his face, and smiling at the camera. A baby sat on his lap, both hands on the steering wheel.

The baby was me and I was looking up at him, grinning, like I was looking at my whole world.

“You and me, kid. We were inseparable.”

He kissed me on the temple and left me to look through the box. But I just sat there for a good ten minutes, staring down at the picture. I’d never seen one of us together besides the one I had up in my room.

Peter came over, his homework abandoned for now. He wrapped an arm around me, moving as close to me as possible.

“You look happy.”

I pressed my lips together trying not to cry. I knew he was talking about the picture because at that moment I probably looked far from happy.

“The only picture my mother ever let me see of him was one where you couldn’t see his face. His back was to the camera, he was walking down the street, and he was holding me. I was facing the camera but…” I shook my head, “the only emotion in the picture was mine.” I looked at Peter. “I never had this to look at. I always thought he left because he didn’t want to be a part of our family, that he didn’t want me.”

“Now you know,” he whispered. “I’m sure, if you read all of this, you’ll find out that he did want to be your family.”

“Then why…”

“Things happen, Cass. The point is,” he tapped the photograph, “the man in this picture and the one that just gave you this box, this house, this home, are the same. He loves you, it’s pretty clear.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Because I love you too and I hope you don’t need a picture to prove it.”